Pamela Jorden: Sun Drawing Water

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Sun Drawing Water, our third solo exhibition with Los Angeles artist Pamela Jorden. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, May 25, 2017, from 6-9pm.

The circle: microscopic or telescopic, either way it designates a fixed-upon spot that needs her focus or a detail of something that extends and may be unbounded.

The round framing device is a graphic lasso, holding the eye’s attention and concentration on a particular, magnified visual zone. That steady zone is a porthole onto shapes swimming in a larger sea—landscape or vortex. On parade, a world passes by in front of these unblinking oculi. We always only see a small part of something larger. Or, alternately, the circle bounds an experiment in growth like a petri dish, a germination habitat where marks bloom, multiply, and spread. An outward, centrifugal flow of ripples and rings. Or, the “O” of Orphism is a synesthetic glory hole and booming boom box. Sonic dimension echoes and reverberates spherically with lush tonalities: expanding and overlapping sound waves, a sonar ping, a banged gong, the pulsing diaphragm of a speaker. The acoustic sun, moon, and foghorns Arthur Dove painted resonate here in the art historical distance. Glowing-light atmospherics, like a stoplight in the fog or a spectral prism: halo, softness, astral fuzz, haze, and shimmer. The metallic glitter and faint iridescence in some paints she uses (the silvers, with mica flakes) are precisely unphotographable—even as, on a certain level, hers are paintings about vision in (or defiantly in spite of) this age of cameras and roboticized lenses.